


Typical Girls

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, F/F, Female Characters, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-11-04 22:43:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17907059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: Thesonsdaughters of Harlan County.





	Typical Girls

**Author's Note:**

> So I got the first line of this stuck in my head while thinking that there are too few fem!Raylan and/or fem!Boyd fics, and then amusingly redjaybathood messaged me saying exactly the same thing, so here's something. Title is from The Slits' "Typical Girls."
> 
> There's mention of domestic violence, because this is still set in Harlan, and people aren't accepting of the trans character being trans, and also mention of menarche, in case that really bothers anyone.

Boyd is three years old when she declares that if Raylan gets to be a girl, then Boyd gets to be a girl, too. The grown ups all laugh. Boyd don’t much care for that reaction, and Raylan has to distract her quick, before she starts screaming and stamping her feet.

Boyd insists on wearing the same dresses that Raylan’s mama bullies her into, wearing pink socks and sparkly shoes and ordering the girl’s toy in her Happy Meal. Bo don’t much care for having his eldest son proclaim herself Bo’s eldest daughter, but his wife talks him into humoring Boyd. She borrows girls’ clothes from the Givenses, fixes Boyd’s short hair with the glittery barrettes that Raylan refuses to wear. She says that Boyd looks adorable, and he’s bound to grow out of it soon; and Bo lets it go on for a while, because it keeps Boyd from screaming and because Bowman’s just been born, a new baby that squalls like a real boy and doesn’t demand flowers in his hair.

Boyd doesn’t grow out of it, though. By the summer before Kindergarten, Boyd’s dark hair is as long as Raylan’s, and she likes it all done up with ribbons braided in. That’s the summer Raylan climbs onto the counter with the scissors and cuts her hair as short as it will go, colors the pink in her shoes with brown marker until it looks like mud.

They start Kindergarten and Bo puts his foot down—two years of pretending his son is a girl is two years too long. He forces his wife to cut off all Boyd’s fine hair, ransacks the dressers and returns all the dresses to the Givenses, threatens to burn them instead when Boyd screams.

“Daddy said I can’t be a girl,” Boyd complains to Raylan on their first day of school, her eyes still red from bawling, her hair shorn and her clothes and sneakers all white and red, black and blue. She doesn’t look anything like Boyd Crowder should, long dark hair with pink ribbons, a dress and pink tights and the new lace-up sneakers with the grommets in pink, too.

Raylan squeezes Boyd’s hand. “You’re okay,” she says, because her mama always says _you’re okay_ whenever Daddy hurts them and Raylan cries. “Besides,” she adds, fumbling for something to cheer Boyd up, “my daddy says it’s better to be born a dog than a girl.”

Arlo Givens wanted a son. He never fails to remind Raylan that Raylan was supposed to be Arlo’s son, not his daughter, that they handed Raylan to him in the hospital and he offered to go drown her in the creek and try again for a boy. Raylan cuts her hair short like her daddy’s and plays softball better than any kid in Little League and wears blue jeans and burps the alphabet and spits farther than all the Crowder boys combined. Raylan flips pennies into the well and wishes she could be the boy her daddy wants, wishes she and Boyd could swap places, wishes she was the son Arlo would love.

She nearly kills herself learning to hunt because Arlo won’t teach her, no use for a daughter with a gun, though he makes her shoot that feral pig and laughs when she misses the shot, calls her a pussy even though she doesn’t cry. She’s the best boy in Harlan County and Arlo still hates her. Arlo’s always going to hate her, she realizes, and so she might as well be a girl.

She regrets her decision almost immediately when she starts bleeding a week later. Raylan’s read enough books to know what’s happening, know that she needs a pad and the school nurse has them and the nurse hates Raylan for starting fights. She stuffs her stained underwear full of toilet paper and waddles over to Boyd between classes, begs Boyd to go to the nurse’s office and fetch her a pad.

“If you’re bleeding, how come I’m not bleeding?” Boyd asks, folding her arms. “They say it happens to girls at the same time, when they’re close.”

“Boyd!” Raylan’s got her thighs pressed together and her shirt untucked and pulled as low as she can tug it, just in case the toilet paper don’t soak up all the blood, and Boyd’s asking questions like they’re in science class, like she don’t know. “For Christ’s sake, you ain’t that kind of girl!"

Boyd doesn’t speak to her for a week. She forgives Raylan eventually, because Raylan steals a bottle of pink nail polish from the pharmacy and climbs through Boyd’s window with the loot, paints Boyd’s toenails because Boyd can leave the polish on for a month and Bo won’t know.

 

Boyd’s fourteen when she tells Raylan that maybe she’s a boy, after all. “Don’t be stupid,” Raylan says, rolling her eyes. “I’ve known you nigh on fifteen years, Boyd Crowder. I’d know it if you were a boy.” Raylan’s putting black polka dots on Boyd’s pink toenails, because it’s Friday night and their daddies are off on a run and their mamas are drinking at Aunt Helen’s and Boyd and Raylan already whooped Johnny and Bowman’s asses at football in the yard, and now Johnny and Bowman are nursing their wounds and watching TV.

“But, I think I like girls,” Boyd stutters, curling her toes. When Raylan looks up at her face she’s blushing, biting down on her bottom lip and staring past Raylan at the bedroom wall. “You know, I mean, I ...”

Boyd runs out of words, and it’s so unusual that Raylan pinches herself just to make sure it’s really so. “You mean you want to ask Marjory Ellen Chatham to the school dance?” she prompts, because all the boys on the baseball team agree that Marjory Ellen is the prettiest girl in junior high. Of course, all the boys agree that Raylan’s only on the team because she’s practically a boy, so Raylan’s teammates are also all idiots.

Boyd shrugs, cheeks pinker than her toenails.

Raylan shrugs back, and her chest aches a little, imagining Boyd dancing with Marjory Ellen, Marjory’s breasts pressed up against Boyd’s chest, Boyd’s arms around Marjory’s waist. “Then ask her out,” Raylan says, huffing. “Who says you have to be a boy just to slow dance with Marjory Ellen?”

She doesn’t mention that Marjory Ellen thinks Boyd is a boy, anyway, because she doesn’t think that’s something Boyd wants to hear.

“Well, who do you like?” Boyd retorts, snaps the question at Raylan like a rubber band, pokes at Raylan with her big toe.

Raylan makes a face, sticks out her tongue. “I like baseball,” she says decisively, and that’s that.

 

Raylan and Boyd steal the make up when they’re sixteen, drive to Cumberland and walk through the supermarket pocketing tubes of mascara and hot pink lipstick and different pencils for your eyes or your mouth or Raylan’s not certain what for. Then they drive into the hills, past the Crowders’ cabin and out to the meadow they found while they were deer hunting last year. Boyd strips down to her underwear and they button her into the ruffled, lavender monstrosity of a dress that Granny Givens gave Raylan for Easter. The neckline gapes on Boyd, and where Raylan was packed in like a sausage the dress and the ruffles highlight Boyd’s slender legs, her slim hips. They twist to face each other in the truck cab and Raylan uses the afternoon light to trace the shape of Boyd’s eyes in black pencil, to draw out her lashes with thick mascara. Raylan uses her thumbs to rub the blush along Boyd’s cheekbones, leans in close to make sure she’s gotten the lipstick over the bow of Boyd’s lips.

Boyd’s beautiful: dark hair and dark eyes that seem wider than they did before, rouged cheeks and lips glowing pink in the fading light. Raylan doesn’t mean to kiss her. It’s dry and short and awkward and smudges Boyd’s lipstick. It’s Raylan’s first kiss.

“I guess I like girls, too,” Raylan mutters, her face flushed redder than Boyd’s blush.

“Why Raylan,” Boyd says, staring at Raylan’s mouth, at the smear of bright pink lipstick on her thin lips. “You know I’m not that kind of girl.” She grins as she says it, flutters her long eyelashes with the mascara that took Raylan forever to do.

“Oh yeah?” Raylan cups Boyd’s face, rubs her thumbs along Boyd’s dusted red cheekbones. She feels like she’s just stolen all four bases, like she’s been running wind sprints and can’t catch her breath. The sun is setting and Boyd’s limned with gold, Boyd’s the prettiest girl Raylan’s ever seen in her life. “What kind of girl are you, then?”

“Come find out,” Boyd tells her, and Raylan does.

 

Three years go by and Boyd starts work at the mine and Raylan breaks Dickie Bennett’s knee, gets herself kicked off the baseball team senior year, though it’s not like she ever could have gone pro—baseball wants a woman player the way Arlo always wanted a daughter, and Raylan’s ability to spit sunflower seeds and hit a ball and steal a base don’t mean shit when she’s got breasts and a cunt.

So she joins Boyd in the mines, just for a little while, just until they have enough money to get out of town. It’s easier for Boyd, because the men think that Boyd is one of them, never mind that they don’t always manage to wipe the make up off before they show up to work, that sometimes Boyd still has mascara caked on her eyelashes or blush high up on one cheek. The men all assume that the make up is Raylan’s, that Raylan is Boyd’s girlfriend, and, well, all those assumptions mean that Raylan can demand a kiss or two underground when she’s being pressed in on all sides by the dark.

Boyd blows shit up and she’s beautiful, standing in a fresh cut surrounded by Emulex, her smile a flash of hot pink lips and white teeth as she shouts, “Fire in the hole!” Boyd blows shit up and earns extra pay to do it and puts all that money to her daddy’s plans or her brother’s football uniforms, and they’re already fighting about it when the mine caves in.

Raylan had painted Boyd’s toenails that morning, pale pink with neon lightning bolts, _RG_ in cursive on Boyd’s big toes, because in seven years Raylan’s learned a thing or two about painting Boyd’s nails.

That’s all she’s learned, though. She never learned all the lessons she should have, all the times Arlo tried to teach her and baseball tried to teach her and Raylan never learned that she was never going to be good enough as she was.

“Why won’t you leave?” Raylan demands, shaking, the lipstick kiss Boyd left under her ear covered in coal dust, all of them buried in dust and nearly buried alive.

“This is who we are,” Boyd replies. But her pink toenails are hidden in her work boots. Her hair’s been cut short for fifteen years, and the dresses they buy her still hang in Raylan’s closet, virtually unworn.

“This isn’t who we are!” Raylan shouts, wants to stamp her feet and scream. “Everybody thinks you’re a goddamned man!”

“And it’s easier for you that way, ain’t it?” Boyd snaps back, bares her teeth in a snarl. “Everybody sees you with a boyfriend, they realize maybe you ain’t a boy after all? Though maybe you still wish you were.”

“The only thing I wish I were,” Raylan answers grimly, “is gone. You stay here and die if that’s how you want it, Boyd Crowder. You ain’t never been my boyfriend, and you clearly ain’t my girl.”

* * *

Raylan doesn’t see Boyd Crowder for twenty years. She goes to college, joins the marshals, takes up with Winona in Utah, paints Winona’s fingernails pink and lets Winona show them off to everyone who’d care to see. She loses Winona to Gary, eventually, but that’s all right. Then she shoots Tommy Bucks and finds herself back in Kentucky, Art Mullen handing her a file with Boyd Crowder’s picture inside. Boyd’s hair is short. Her eyes are dark and wide.

She comes out of the church and down the steps, her arms outstretched, a faint hint of black pencil around her eyes. “You know,” Raylan says conspiratorially, as she steps forward into Boyd’s embrace, “Ava Crowder kissed me hello.”

“Why Raylan Givens,” Boyd says, and she’s laughing, pink lips and white teeth, the most beautiful woman in the world. “You know I’m not that kind of girl.”


End file.
